Nobody Cares About Your Art

ur gallery opening (if you even get that far) has five attendees. Your latest song has three plays on Spotify, all of them by yourself. Your self-published poetry collection sits in a stack of twenty copies in your bedroom, untouched by any hand except yours.

All the digital metrics stare back like disappointed parents.

Zero likes. Minimal engagement. Crickets chirping in the void of the internet.

Welcome to the reality of making art in 2025.

We live in an era of impossible abundance. Every second, 500 hours of video upload to YouTube. A new book publishes every few minutes. Instagram floods with millions of images daily.

The cultural landscape has exploded into fragments so small they're approaching atomic level.

There's a niche for everything. But somehow, paradoxically, there's no room for anything new.

You scroll through endless feeds of creators who appear to have "made it". Meanwhile, your own work feels like shouting into a hurricane.

The algorithms don't favor you. The gatekeepers don't know you exist. Finding your supposed "audience" feels like searching for a specific grain of sand on a beach that stretches infinitely in all directions.

This is where sane people stop.

They look at the overwhelming competition, the saturated markets, the impossibility of breaking through, and they put down their brushes, close their laptops, silence their instruments. It's the rational, practical, even wise move to make.

They're wrong.

The AI Excuse

Lately there's a new reason to quit: artificial intelligence.

"Why paint when AI can generate art in seconds?" "Why write when ChatGPT exists?" "Why compose when algorithms can create music?" It's the latest in a long line of excuses dressed up as legitimate concerns.

AI anxiety is just another form of external validation seeking. It assumes art's value lies in its utility, efficiency, or market viability. It reduces creativity to a competition where the fastest, cheapest, most scalable option wins.

That's not what art is.

Art has never been about efficiency. Art has never been about being the only person who can do something. Van Gogh painted in a world full of painters. Hemingway wrote in a world full of writers. They didn't stop because others were making art too.

The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

The real secret isn't about finding your niche in the overcrowded marketplace. It's about understanding that the marketplace was never the point to begin with.

When you create art purely for external validation (for likes, shares, sales, recognition), you're essentially letting strangers dictate your creative decisions. You're outsourcing your artistic judgment to people who don't know you, don't understand your vision, and frankly, might not even care much about art at all.

But when you create for internal validation, something magical happens.

You stop trying to guess what others want and start discovering what you need to express.

You stop chasing trends and start setting them, even if no one notices.

You stop measuring success by metrics and start measuring it by growth, satisfaction, and the simple joy of making something that didn't exist before.

You relocate the source of your creative energy from the fickle external world to the reliable internal one.

The Abundance is Actually the Gift

The overwhelming multiplicity of culture today makes breakthrough seem impossible. But it's actually the greatest gift artists have ever received. Never before have creators had such freedom to explore micro-niches, experimental forms, or deeply personal visions.

You can make art for an audience of one hundred people who connect with your work. Instead of chasing a million who might barely notice it.

You can explore techniques that interest you rather than ones that sell.

You can develop your voice over months, years and decades rather than trying to viral your way to instant success.

The noise of the cultural moment gives you perfect cover to do the real work: developing your craft, finding your voice, building the body of work that will matter regardless of who else sees it.

Keep Making Anyway

So here's the radical proposition of our moment: make art anyway. Make it when nobody's watching. Make it when everyone's watching but not paying attention. Make it when AI can supposedly do it better, faster, cheaper.

The secret isn't about finding your place in the cultural marketplace.

The secret is realizing you don't need permission to create, validation to continue, or an audience to justify the work.

The secret is that making art when nobody's watching might be the purest form of art there is.